


Grief

by sparki111



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, John Watson - Freeform, M/M, Sherlock Holmes - Freeform, Sherlock Is Not Okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 17:55:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4844933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparki111/pseuds/sparki111
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him… The land of tears is so mysterious.”<br/>~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘The Little Prince’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grief

**Author's Note:**

> So this was inspired by the absolutely breath-taking piece of fanart by AlessiaPelonzi (link: http://alessiapelonzi.deviantart.com/art/Grief-452550609). It's dark and tragic, set post-Reichenbach, warning for language, and I don't know what I was thinking, but here it is, and I leave the verdict in my readers' capable hands.

_“I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him… The land of tears is so mysterious.”_

    **~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘ _The Little Prince_ ’**

 

* * *

“Fuck 'em all! Fuck 'em all! The l-long and the short and the t-tall!”

Sherlock opened his eyes. He’d left the window open. Intentionally, for this very reason. Quickly, he sat up. The sofa creaked as he did.

“Fuck all the Sergeants and W.O.l.'s!”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes.

“Fuck all the corporals and their bastard sons-,”

There was a scuffle. Rubber against concrete. John had stumbled on the doorstep.

“-for we're saying goodbye to them all!”

It didn’t interrupt his song, however. Sherlock leant forward, and he closed his eyes. Through the darkness, he listened as the door slammed beneath him. The noise shook the entire flat. Thankfully, Mrs. Hudson was gone. Away. Visiting her sister – or her cousin. Somebody.

“As up the C.O.'s arse they crawl!”

John’s feet thundered up the stairway. Again, Sherlock listened as he stumbled; the man lost his balance, toppled sideways, and crashed against the wall. Sherlock peeked out from beneath his eyelids. Something hot flared in his chest. But he took a deep breath, and ignored it.

The footsteps started again.

“You'll get no promotion this side of the ocean!”

Closer. Closer. And then, the front door slammed open.

“So cheer up my lads, fuck 'em all-,”

John saw Sherlock, and he stopped. One hand against the door, he blinked, looking, for all the world, like a deer, trapped in the headlights of an oncoming express train. He opened his mouth - going to say something, was he? And then, he snapped it shut again.   
  


Perhaps not.  
  


Sherlock, for his part, had not moved from his perch on the sofa. He studied the smaller man. John still hadn’t pulled his hand from the doorknob. Still hadn’t actually made his way _into_ the flat. Even though the space between them was shadowy at best, Sherlock could see the unsteadiness in the doctor’s eyes. The dark-blue of his irises was hazy, not focused as they should have been.   
  


There was a reason, founded and utterly valid, that Sherlock disliked alcohol. And that reason was embodied poignantly in the way that John swayed from one side to the next as he finally managed to wander his way through the door. The indignance of the movement made that confounded heat move through his lungs again, and Sherlock drew his brows into a frown.  
  


“John.”  
  


The door swung shut loudly, prompted by the heel of John’s shoe. “Sherlock!” The man spread his arms wide, in a sort of misplaced gesture of welcome - as though it were Sherlock who had only just arrived. As though it were Sherlock who had been gone all night, without a word, without  a warning of any kind. As though it were the doctor himself , and not detective, who had returned, weary and Chinese takeout-laden from New Scotland Yard, only to find the front door unlocked, the flat abandoned, and his partner missing.   
  


It had taken Sherlock all of two minutes to figure out where John had carried himself. He had dumped the now-forgotten food upon the sofa, fully intending to stalk his way down to the Last Drop pub, and drag what would surely be an inebriated doctor back to the Bakers Street abode. In fact, he was halfway out the door, when his eye was caught by the charity-store calendar that John had insisted on hanging in the kitchen.

_Of course._

__

There was nothing out of place. No markings, no subtle or overt shreds of evidence left to solidify a theory. No circle scratched in red. But the printed digits burned before Sherlock. And a recollection: the periodic buzzing of his mobile, promptly ignored for the majority of the afternoon, and the entirety of the evening.

_Damn it._

__

It was with trepidation that he pulled the device from within his coat. Against the fluorescent glow of the screen, the pixels heralded unseen messages. Seven. All from John.

_Damn it._

__

He didn’t read them - to all-too familiar chiding of  _not good, Sherlock_ was enough. Either did he make it out of the flat; he stayed, trapped pathetically by boundaries that - _ridiculously, ridiculously_ \- did not actually exist. And it was here that John found him. Sherlock was unsure as to at what point he had ended up upon the old sofa. But he had arrived, and John, standing unsteadily in the doorway, his face contorted with drunken stupidity, was proving little incentive for him to move leave.

“Sherlock!” John declared once again. In that same, ignorant tone. A manufactured replay, rather than an address - as though it were the first sound he had made since his arrival.

“John.” The cyclic nature was setting him on edge. But John seemed unconcerned. Indeed, he didn’t even attempt to bite back the giggling that assaulted Sherlock’s ears.

“Sorry ‘bout the singin’,” he murmured sheepishly. “Hope I didn’t wake you.” And then, he shook his head. “Whadd’am I saying?” He looked to the ceiling, searching for a response. When it didn’t come, he shook his head again. “Sherlock Holmes _sleeping_? My arse.”

With that, he stumbled into the kitchen. And it was some moments before Sherlock managed to follow.

He hesitated in the doorway, watching as John moved around the clutter. He hadn’t glanced towards the light switch, and although Sherlock’s fingers twitched to do the opposite, he too left it be. Because there was a childish part - _sentiment, Sherlock_ \- of him that was leaning on the notion of ignorance inditing bliss - what he couldn’t see remained unreal.

And what he pretended that he couldn’t see was John Watson, all but falling to his knees as he fumbled with a too-empty kettle. “Tea?” his sing-song voice grated over Sherlock. And when the detective didn’t answer, the doctor added, “Sheeer-lock?”

“John,” Sherlock ventured, “perhaps you should sit down. I’m more than capable-,”

“ _Bloody hell_ , Sherlock, do you want tea, or not?!”

John’s explosion effectively silenced any protest that Sherlock was in the midst of making.

“Yes, thank you.” His throat was inexplicably tight.

In the darkness of the kitchen, John nodded. But he made no move to follow through with his offer. No, rather, Sherlock looked on as he leaned over the dirty sink. His hands gripped the edges of the benchtop, and Sherlock didn’t need artificially-provided light to know that the doctor’s knuckles had taken on a bloodless white.

“John-,”

“Actually, I’ve changed my mind. You can make the tea.”

And he stalked through the dimness, past Sherlock, his eyes fixed ahead on something that only he could identify. The intoxicated-ease with which he had returned had vanished. Something had changed, something had shifted. A proverbial switch flicked.  

Sherlock didn’t bother with the tea.

Instead, he looked on as John came to a halt in the midst of their flat. The line of his shoulders worsened, and Sherlock’s gut twisted painfully. The colours of the too-bright calendar had successfully seared themselves into the space behind his eyes, and now, they floated above the two men. The ghost of a long-lost… _something-or-another._

If it had been funny, Sherlock may have laughed aloud.

He was hesitant to address the doctor again. And with good reason. “John-,”

“Have fun at Barts?”

This time - _third-time lucky_ \- it was the venom that stopped Sherlock short. He blinked, but even as he did, the heat that had been assaulting his vital organs was poisoned into something more ice-like. Apprehension did not begin to describe the sensation that was creeping through Sherlock’s being.

“Hm? Have _fun_ , Sherlock?” John spun on his heel. The dark eyes he fixed on the taller man were surprisingly sharp. Uncharacteristically cold. “Lose your phone, did you?”

There was something to say in this situation, Sherlock was certain. There had to be.

“I’m sorry, John.”

This was not that something.

A moment of stillness, and then John’s foot sent the coffee table skidding across the room. The wood splintered against the wall. Sherlock, despite himself, flinched.

“You’re sorry?” The slur had left John’s words. “You’re _sorry_?”

The ice had begun to freeze itself into a shape that resembled fear. And Sherlock panicked. “You heard me, did you not?” he snapped. “ _Do_ try and keep up, John.” _Damn it. Damn it._

The doctor’s eyes flared. “You bastard”

The floor should split and swallow him. Why was it impossible? God, why was it _physically impossible_?

“You… fucking _bastard_!”

Sherlock had quietly cherished his ability to tune out the world for the whole of his adult life. The halls within his memory were lined in shades and flashes of the crucial, of the essential. The needless banished, the pointless deleted. The emotionally-painful, the emotionally-damning refused entry, blocked out before it had the chance to take destructive root.

But Sherlock did not block out John Watson. He did not.

He didn’t block out the scathing words, the cruel and angry words, each of which he deserved and more. He didn’t even attempt to block out the pain that John’s fist beneath his left eye sent spiralling through his consciousness. The shouts, all of them, not a single one denied. And when, at last, the two men found themselves broken upon the sofa, covered in darkness, Sherlock did not block out John’s sobs. He wanted to - God, _did he want to_. But he didn’t.

“One… thing, Sherlock.”

“I know.”

“ _One thing_. That’s all… all I asked.”

“I know-,”

“I needed you. I fucking… I fucking _needed_ you, and-,”

“I know, God, John, I know. I know.”

“I… I _needed_ …”

He was lost to his grief. And Sherlock held him as he wept. The scent of the doctor’s tears, mixed with the sharpness of his sweat and the bitterness of his intoxication burned Sherlock’s senses. The body in his arms trembled, trembled uncontrollably. There was no control. Control was not an element of their position.

“It… it would have been her first birthday. Do you… you realise that, Sherlock?”

He was so far away. And in that moment, it was terrifying. It was horrifying, petrifying, terrifying.

It was _terrifying._

“She would have… f-fuck, she… would have been a-a year old.”

There was something to say in this situation, Sherlock was certain. But it was lost to him. Like the land of tears that John had hidden himself in, it was indecipherable for the detective. There were no threads to grasp; nothing he could use to pull his companion back from the edge.

And so, Sherlock held John, as John wandered through that alien land. In the darkness, pressed together, they formed a single shape. Sherlock struggled to comprehend how any two people could be so close, and so irreducibly far away.

 

**Author's Note:**

> If any one of you have made it this far, you have my thanks. Comments would be wonderful - I would love to know what you all thought of it (might inspire me to publish more!)


End file.
